The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Chronicles of Narnia, #5) (Publication Order, #3)

by C.S. Lewis

THERE WAS A BOY CALLED EUSTACE Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card. He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

Eustace Clarence disliked his cousins the four Pevensies, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.

coached by old Professor Kirke in whose house these four children had had wonderful adventures long ago in the war years.

Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country but for most of us it is only an imaginary country.

Their secret country was real. They had already visited it twice; not in a game or a dream but in reality.

(By the way, if you are going to read this story at all, and if you don’t know already, you had better get it into your head that the left of a ship when you are looking ahead, is port, and the right is starboard.)

Edmund was heaved up, and then the miserable Eustace. Last of all came the stranger—a golden-headed boy some years older than herself. “Ca—Ca—Caspian!” gasped Lucy as soon as she had breath enough. For Caspian it was;

Narnian time flows differently from ours. If you spent a hundred years in Narnia, you would still come back to our world at the very same hour of the very same day on which you left. And then, if you went back to Narnia after spending a week here, you might find that a thousand Narnian years had passed, or only a day, or no time at all. You never know till you get there.

“This is a merry shipmate you’ve brought us, brother,” whispered Caspian to Edmund with a chuckle;

Reepicheep, the most valiant of all the talking beasts of Narnia, and the Chief Mouse.

Lucy found herself as much at home as if she had been in Caspian’s cabin for weeks, and the motion of the ship did not worry her, for in the old days when she had been a queen in Narnia she had done a good deal of voyaging.

It’s a year ago by our time since we left you just before your coronation. How long has it been in Narnia?” “Exactly three years,” said Caspian.

Well, on my coronation day, with Aslan’s approval, I swore an oath that, if once I established peace in Narnia, I would sail east myself for a year and a day to find my father’s friends or to learn of their deaths and avenge them if I could.

Harold says one of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to Facts.

Narnia has never been so right...

I tried to make him see what Alberta says, that all that sort of thing is really lowering girls but he was too dense.

It is not very easy to draw one’s sword when one is swinging round in the air by one’s tail, but he did.

He realized that he was a monster cut off from the whole human race. An appalling loneliness came over him. He began to see that the others had not really been fiends at all. He began to wonder if he himself had been such a nice person as he had always supposed.

A powerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.

And there is nothing a dragon likes so well as fresh dragon. That is why you so seldom find more than one dragon in the same county.

“It’ll be worse if it does,” said Edmund, “because then we shan’t know where it is. If there’s a wasp in the room I like to be able to see it.”

The pleasure (quite new to him) of being liked and, still more, of liking other people, was what kept Eustace from despair.

He was almost afraid to be alone with himself and yet he was ashamed to be with the others.

“That’s all right,” said Edmund. “Between ourselves, you haven’t been as bad as I was on my first trip to Narnia. You were only an ass, but I was a traitor.”

It would be nice, and fairly nearly true, to say that “from that time forth Eustace was a different boy.” To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.

“did I not explain to you once before that no one is ever told what would have happened?”

Do not look so sad. We shall meet soon again.” “Please, Aslan,” said Lucy, “what do you call soon?” “I call all times soon,” said Aslan;

“All times may be soon to Aslan; but in my home all hungry times are one o’clock.”

I wonder why you can get into our world and we never get into yours? If only I had the chance! It must be exciting to live on a thing like a ball. Have

water from the sea, stronger than wine and somehow wetter, more liquid, than ordinary water,

“Dearest,” said Aslan very gently, “you and your brother will never come back to Narnia.”

“I am,” said Aslan. “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”